Complete Stories (25 page)

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Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca

BOOK: Complete Stories
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“Tha’s terr’ble, Mis’ Morse, swearin’ an’ talkin’ like that,” said Nettie, “after what people done for you. Here I ain’ had no sleep at all for two nights, an’ had to give up goin’ out to my other ladies!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Nettie,” she said. “You’re a peach. I’m sorry I’ve given you so much trouble. I couldn’t help it. I just got sunk. Didn’t you ever feel like doing it? When everything looks just lousy to you?”
“I wouldn’ think o’ no such thing,” declared Nettie. “You got to cheer up. Tha’s what you got to do. Everybody’s got their troubles.”
“Yeah,” said Mrs. Morse. “I know.”
“Come a pretty picture card for you,” Nettie said. “Maybe that will cheer you up.”
She handed Mrs. Morse a post-card. Mrs. Morse had to cover one eye with her hand, in order to read the message; her eyes were not yet focusing correctly.
It was from Art. On the back of a view of the Detroit Athletic Club he had written: “Greeting and salutations. Hope you have lost that gloom. Cheer up and don’t take any rubber nickles. See you on Thursday.”
She dropped the card to the floor. Misery crushed her as if she were between great smooth stones. There passed before her a slow, slow pageant of days spent lying in her flat, of evenings at Jimmy’s being a good sport, making herself laugh and coo at Art and other Arts; she saw a long parade of weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things. Her feet throbbed as if she had crammed them into the stubby champagne-colored slippers. Her heart seemed to swell and harden.
“Nettie,” she cried, “for heaven’s sake pour me a drink, will you?”
The maid looked doubtful.
“Now you know, Mis’ Morse,” she said, “you been near daid. I don’ know if the doctor he let you drink nothin’ yet.”
“Oh, never mind him,” she said. “You get me one, and bring in the bottle. Take one yourself.”
“Well,” said Nettie.
She poured them each a drink, deferentially leaving hers in the bathroom to be taken in solitude, and brought Mrs. Morse’s glass in to her.
Mrs. Morse looked into the liquor and shuddered back from its odor. Maybe it would help. Maybe, when you had been knocked cold for a few days, your very first drink would give you a lift. Maybe whisky would be her friend again. She prayed without addressing a God, without knowing a God. Oh, please, please, let her be able to get drunk, please keep her always drunk.
She lifted the glass.
“Thanks, Nettie,” she said. “Here’s mud in your eye.”
The maid giggled. “Tha’s the way, Mis’ Morse,” she said. “You cheer up, now.”
“Yeah,” said Mrs. Morse. “Sure.”
 
The Bookman
, February 1929
You Were Perfectly Fine
 
The pale young man eased himself carefully into the low chair, and rolled his head to the side, so that the cool chintz comforted his cheek and temple.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh.”
The clear-eyed girl, sitting light and erect on the couch, smiled brightly at him.
“Not feeling so well today?” she said.
“Oh, I’m great,” he said. “Corking, I am. Know what time I got up? Four o’clock this afternoon, sharp. I kept trying to make it, and every time I took my head off the pillow, it would roll under the bed. This isn’t my head I’ve got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”
“Do you think maybe a drink would make you feel better?” she said.
“The hair of the mastiff that bit me?” he said. “Oh, no, thank you. Please never speak of anything like that again. I’m through. I’m all, all through. Look at that hand; steady as a humming-bird. Tell me, was I very terrible last night?”
“Oh, goodness,” she said, “everybody was feeling pretty high. You were all right.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I must have been dandy. Is everybody sore at me?”
“Good heavens, no,” she said. “Everyone thought you were terribly funny. Of course, Jim Pierson was a little stuffy, there for a minute at dinner. But people sort of held him back in his chair, and got him calmed down. I don’t think anybody at the other tables noticed it at all. Hardly anybody.”
“He was going to sock me?” he said. “Oh, Lord. What did I do to him?”
“Why, you didn’t do a thing,” she said. “You were perfectly fine. But you know how silly Jim gets, when he thinks anybody is making too much fuss over Elinor.”
“Was I making a pass at Elinor?” he said. “Did I do that?”
“Of course you didn’t,” she said. “You were only fooling, that’s all. She thought you were awfully amusing. She was having a marvelous time. She only got a little tiny bit annoyed just once, when you poured the clam-juice down her back.”
“My God,” he said. “Clam-juice down that back. And every vertebra a little Cabot. Dear God. What’ll I ever do?”
“Oh, she’ll be all right,” she said. “Just send her some flowers, or something. Don’t worry about it. It isn’t anything.”
“No, I won’t worry,” he said. “I haven’t got a care in the world. I’m sitting pretty. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Did I do any other fascinating tricks at dinner?”
“You were fine,” she said. “Don’t be so foolish about it. Everybody was crazy about you. The maître d’hôtel was a little worried because you wouldn’t stop singing, but he really didn’t mind. All he said was, he was afraid they’d close the place again, if there was so much noise. But he didn’t care a bit, himself. I think he loved seeing you have such a good time. Oh, you were just singing away, there, for about an hour. It wasn’t so terribly loud, at all.”
“So I sang,” he said. “That must have been a treat. I sang.”
“Don’t you remember?” she said. “You just sang one song after another. Everybody in the place was listening. They loved it. Only you kept insisting that you wanted to sing some song about some kind of fusiliers or other, and everybody kept shushing you, and you’d keep trying to start it again. You were wonderful. We were all trying to make you stop singing for a minute, and eat something, but you wouldn’t hear of it. My, you were funny.”
“Didn’t I eat any dinner?” he said.
“Oh, not a thing,” she said. “Every time the waiter would offer you something, you’d give it right back to him, because you said that he was your long-lost brother, changed in the cradle by a gypsy band, and that anything you had was his. You had him simply roaring at you.”
“I bet I did,” he said. “I bet I was comical. Society’s Pet, I must have been. And what happened then, after my overwhelming success with the waiter?”
“Why, nothing much,” she said. “You took a sort of dislike to some old man with white hair, sitting across the room, because you didn’t like his necktie and you wanted to tell him about it. But we got you out, before he got really mad.”
“Oh, we got out,” he said. “Did I walk?”
“Walk! Of course you did,” she said. “You were absolutely all right. There was that nasty stretch of ice on the sidewalk, and you did sit down awfully hard, you poor dear. But good heavens, that might have happened to anybody.”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Louisa Alcott or anybody. So I fell down on the sidewalk. That would explain what’s the matter with my—Yes. I see. And then what, if you don’t mind?”
“Ah, now, Peter!” she said. “You can’t sit there and say you don’t remember what happened after that! I did think that maybe you were just a little tight at dinner—oh, you were perfectly all right, and all that, but I did know you were feeling pretty gay. But you were so serious, from the time you fell down—I never knew you to be that way. Don’t you know, how you told me I had never seen your real self before? Oh, Peter, I just couldn’t bear it, if you didn’t remember that lovely long ride we took together in the taxi! Please, you do remember that, don’t you? I think it would simply kill me, if you didn’t.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Riding in the taxi. Oh, yes, sure. Pretty long ride, hmm?”
“Round and round and round the park,” she said. “Oh, and the trees were shining so in the moonlight. And you said you never knew before that you really had a soul.”
“Yes,” he said. “I said that. That was me.”
“You said such lovely, lovely things,” she said. “And I’d never known, all this time, how you had been feeling about me, and I’d never dared to let you see how I felt about you. And then last night—oh, Peter dear, I think that taxi ride was the most important thing that ever happened to us in our lives.”
“Yes,” he said. “I guess it must have been.”
“And we’re going to be so happy,” she said. “Oh, I just want to tell everybody! But I don’t know—I think maybe it would be sweeter to keep it all to ourselves.”
“I think it would be,” he said.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Great.”
“Lovely!” she said.
“Look here,” he said, “do you mind if I have a drink? I mean, just medicinally, you know. I’m off the stuff for life, so help me. But I think I feel a collapse coming on.”
“Oh, I think it would do you good,” she said. “You poor boy, it’s a shame you feel so awful. I’ll go make you a whisky and soda.”
“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t see how you could ever want to speak to me again, after I made such a fool of myself, last night. I think I’d better go join a monastery in Tibet.”
“You crazy idiot!” she said. “As if I could ever let you go away now! Stop talking like that. You were perfectly fine.”
She jumped up from the couch, kissed him quickly on the forehead, and ran out of the room.
The pale young man looked after her and shook his head long and slowly, then dropped it in his damp and trembling hands.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”
 
The New Yorker
, February 23, 1929
The Cradle of Civilization
 
The two young New Yorkers sat on the cool terrace that rose sharp from the Mediterranean, and looked into deep gin fizzes, embellished, in the Riviera manner, with mint. They were dressed, the girl and the young man, in identical garments; but anyone could easily have distinguished between him and her. Their costumes seemed to have been assembled in compliment to the general region of their Summer visit, lest any one district feel slighted; they wore berets, striped fishing-shirts, wide-legged cotton trousers, and rope-soled
espadrilles
. Thus, a French-man, summering at an American resort, might have attired himself in a felt sombrero, planter’s overalls, and rubber hip-boots.
A bay of smooth, silent water stretched between their backs and the green and white island where the Man in the Iron Mask had been pris oned, his face shrouded in black velvet and hope in his sick heart. To their right, back of the long rocks, lay the town the Phoenicians founded, and beyond it the four-pointed fort that the wise had proclaimed, when Vauban planned it, would end all war for all time. The mild harbor to which Napoleon had come back from Elba dented the shore to their left. Far in the hills above their lowered eyes hung the little vertical city from the walls of which the last of the relayed signal fires had risen, to flame back to Italy the news of Caesar’s fresh conquests in Gaul. . . .
“Come on, sea-pig,” the young man said. “Get rid of that, and we’ll fasten onto another. Oh, garçon. Encore deux jeen feezes, tou de suite.”
“Yes, sir,” his waiter said.
“And mettez un peu more de jeen in them cette fois, baby,” the young man said. “Atta boy. Wonderful little yellow race, these French.”
“They’re crazy,” the girl said. “You should have seen that poor nut Bill and I crashed into, driving back from the Casino at four o’clock this morning. My God, all we did was bust his bumper a little, and you’d have thought we’d killed him. He kept screaming all this stuff about why did these Americans come over here, anyway. And there was Bill, so tight he couldn’t see, yelling right back at him, ‘Yes, and if we hadn’t come over, this would be Germany now.’ I never laughed so hard in my life.”
“Casino any good last night?” he said.
“Oh, it was all right,” she said. “Bill lost eighty-five thousand francs.”
“How much is that in money?” he said.
“Lord knows,” she said. “I can’t be bothered figuring. We didn’t stay long. I was in bed by half-past four.”
“I got in at seven,” he said. “And woke up at eleven o’clock, still stewed.”
“What did you do all evening?” she said.
“I don’t remember much about it,” he said. “I must have barged all around. There was one place where I got up and led the orchestra—I guess that must have been at the Splendide. Oh, yes, I remember now. And Bob Weed got this idea in his head he wanted to play a violin, and this Frog violinist they have in the orchestra wouldn’t let him have his, and the thing got broken in the struggle, and the Frog cried. Honestly. Cried his head off. Bob gave him five hundred francs.”
“He’s crazy,” she said. “A hundred would have been more than enough.”

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